American Romantic

by Ward Just

  They drank cocktails for an hour and sat at table for three. His father brought out his best Bordeaux and the good glassware and china. The Regency table, one leaf less than in the old days, accommodated everyone nicely. His father carved the lamb himself. They talked American politics and, a concession to Harry, a little about foreign affairs. But the conversation always returned to Washington. What do they think in Europe of this fellow Clinton? Gives a good speech, doesn’t he? His wife’s a hellion. They were mostly Democrats but they had a high regard for George H. W. Bush. Harry Sr. and Horace Green had been at Yale at more or less the same time as Poppy, give or take a decade or two. Like the former president, Horace had been a member of Skull and Bones, though of course that was not mentioned. They agreed that Poppy wasn’t much of a politician but that was what they liked about him, a gentleman through and through. Jimmy Candless thought the Kuwait action was superbly conceived and executed. Over the years Harry’s father had lost his enthusiasm for Bob Taft, humorless man of principle. Instead, he favored Adlai Stevenson, a man of his own generation. They said Adlai dithered but that was a vicious calumny. Adlai was patient, quite another thing altogether. Whatever happened to wit in our politics? Instead of wit we got Reagan.

  Harry was relaxed at his father’s table, everything in the room familiar, including the roast lamb, the Bordeaux, and the conversation, the company ever so slightly dotty. Harry had the idea that this Connecticut world was a closed circle that had existed since the Continental Congress, or anyway since the first Roosevelt administration, with a way to go before the impatient God of the universe snapped His fingers and closed it down, never to be seen again. Time’s up! Too much of a good thing. Harry’s mind drifted as the company commenced a discussion of FDR’s love life, Missy Lehand and Mrs. Suckley and others before them. Of course everyone knew but no one said anything. That was the way things were done then, in the way that news photographers never photographed Roosevelt in his wheelchair. A common courtesy. That was before the press flew out of control, putting themselves on the wrong side of common decency in their zeal to air dirty linen, bedroom stuff. Didn’t you find them that way, Harry? Well, Harry said, no, not actually—and then, noticing the frowns, he knew he had to throw them a bone lest he be seen as a spoilsport. He said, Some of them are egomaniacs. Well, of course, Horace Green said, that’s the fundamental problem, unchecked power. They’re ghouls, you know . . . And then, distracted once again, Harry noticed that the Marsden Hartley was missing from the wall behind his father’s head. Munnings’s horse was there next to Homer’s boat but Marsden Hartley’s landscape had vanished. Harry waited until the guests had departed before he asked his father about it. The old man made a dismissive gesture.

  He said, What’s it to you?

  What happened to it? I always liked it where it was.

  Gave it to Yale, his father said.

  What are they going to do with it at Yale?

  Put it in the art museum, dummy.

  I didn’t know they had an art museum at Yale.

  Of course they do. Beautiful museum. First-rate stuff.

  I miss it on the wall.

  You can see it at Yale, his father said.

  I’m damned if I’m driving all the way to New Haven to see the Marsden Hartley.

  If you want to see it, you will. Because that’s where it is and it isn’t going anywhere. I gave it in the name of your mother.

  All right then, Harry said.

  They were very appreciative, his father said.

  I imagine they were, Harry said.

  Harry awoke early the next morning, made a pot of coffee, and went outside to sit on the stone wall and wait for his father, still abed. The weather remained warm. He thought he had never seen a surround as benign as this one, close to an artist’s conception of well-heeled country life. It had a fullness and completion not found in nature. Even the hollyhocks and roses looked sketched rather than natural, even now in late autumn. The land itself seemed to relax and take a breather. The oak grove had not grown but the trees were ancient when he was a boy. Harry supposed they were patient like Adlai Stevenson. And then as if on cue a doe and her two fawns appeared in the field, paused, and bounded away. The deer family looked as if they were weightless and at any moment might ascend into the sky like Santa’s reindeer. They disappeared into the mist rising from the brook beyond the oak grove. Harry turned to see his father at the kitchen window. He, too, had been watching the deer family and had not noticed Harry sitting on the stone wall. He moved away from the window and Harry thought again how the house was much too big for one solitary man, five bedrooms and four baths, a living room the size of a squash court, and of course the dining room. The kitchen was as big as any of his embassy kitchens. Better appointed, too, though the appliances were decades old and the linoleum floor was cracking. Although that was not how his father saw it.

  Nonsense, he said. This is where I live, have done since before you were born . . . The old man paused then and went away somewhere, his face expressionless, his eyes fixed on some distant vista. You see, he said at last, I know where everything is. That’s the point. Nothing’s lost.

  On the road the next day, driving at speed now, Harry decided he had had a fine time with his father, despite the moments of amnesia. They had reminisced a little and the old man had told a charming story about Harry’s mother, something to do with an old flirtation, a harmless flirtation, a flirtation they could laugh about. Oh, I do miss her, he said. I almost gave it up when she died and then I decided not to. She wouldn’t’ve liked it if I had. Pull up your socks! she would’ve said. There were other stories from the old days, as well worn as an old suit. Harry told a few stories of his own, about May and May’s love of horseback riding, her unfinished life of Goya, her apprehension of the diplomatic life, their good times together that were cut short by the accident, god damned freak accident. Harry said to his father, Did you like her? Oh, yes, the old man said. Your mother, too. May was down-to-earth. She fit right in here, didn’t she? Yes, Harry said after a moment. Yes, I think she did.

  Isn’t it a grand old place?

  The best, Harry said.

  You’re welcome here anytime. Stay as long as you’d like. Move in if you want to. God knows there’s room.

  I’ve found a place in the south of France. Small village. Hospitable.

  Well, good, his father said. I hope it works out. I’ve never liked the French myself.

  You don’t know the French.

  I knew them in my youth.

  You did?

  I was there with Mother and Dad, a few years after the Great War. We sailed from New York and docked at Southampton. We took the grand tour. First class all the way. One week in London, one week in Paris, a week in Berlin, and a week in Rome. In Paris we stayed at the Meurice. We had a view of the Tuileries from our rooms.

  Well, that would certainly do it.

  Exactly. I’ve never liked them, knowing them as I do.

  Harry was almost at the Connecticut Turnpike when he remembered the Marsden Hartley and decided to make a detour to New Haven. It took him some time to find the museum but there the landscape was, on the second floor, on a crowded wall of American art. His father’s Marsden Hartley looked out of place among the Sloans and an especially fine Sargent. Harry wondered why this was and decided finally that its abnormality had to do only with his own familiarity with it. He looked at the Marsden Hartley and the other pictures for a while, then returned to his car, happy he had made the detour. A month later Harry resigned from the foreign service and returned to Europe, convinced the Marsden Hartley belonged on his father’s dining room wall where it had lived for so many years. But, even so, it was not lost.

  Ten

  HE was old now and forgetful of things large and small, to the point where he did not venture far from his cottage on the Mediterranean coast. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the thought that he might lose himself if he strayed too far from familiar surroundings, t
he village up the road, the tiny port in the crease a half mile or so due south. Really, he was comfortable only in his own context, his cottage and what he could see from the porch of the cottage. Harry’s world had become abbreviated, spare like an early Frost poem or one of Edward Hopper’s night scenes. Yet Harry was not lonely and in fact prospered in his remote corner of Provence. The twice-weekly femme de ménage now came every other day, inventing fantastic excuses on arrival. The electricity failed last night and I was worried about you, and now that I am here I intend to dust the closets. Claudette pretended to dust the closets and Harry pretended irritation at being disturbed. The truth was, he liked having her around. She was talkative and devoted to him in her own way. Claudette’s husband had died years ago and her children had their own lives in Avignon. She preferred Harry’s house with its view of the sea to her own house in the village. She liked him, too, with his stories and observations of the diplomatic life. She thought of him as a gentleman of the old school, his chronic forgetfulness but an endearing consequence of his years as a man of the world. Often at the end of the day she would prepare a pot of tea and they would sit quietly and talk of small things. Promptly at six she would depart for the village and he would clear away the tea things and make himself a large scotch, ice, no water.

  He no longer walked to the village but drove his car. Arthritic hips affected his balance and his feet were worse than ever. Still, he enjoyed the domino games and the country gossip that surrounded him in the café. At gatherings in the café after a funeral he was often asked to contribute a reminiscence. He was still called upon to settle disputes of a factual nature. Were the Bonaparte and Orléans families banished from France before the Franco-Prussian War or after it? Was it Manet or Monet who painted water lilies? In his turn, he would ask about Jacques Chirac’s many mistresses. Their response was muted, ambiguous, and ever so slightly offended. The truth was, they had no idea of the president’s romantic life. That was the sort of information restricted to six or seven arrondissements in the city of Paris. There was a local idiom for it: information that did not walk but slept.

  He had lived in Colle St.-Jacques for almost fifteen years and could not imagine living anywhere else. The inhabitants were old and the village was very old, its church dating to medieval times. Harry went often to Sunday Mass and also during the week, sitting in a rear pew and enjoying the creaks and groans of the ancient building, alive after all these years. One of the clerestory windows above the choir was of stained glass, some biblical scene, too distant for Harry to identify. In the bright sunlight of midmorning the colors were brilliant. For years he had thought of donating a window if there were any glassmakers in the vicinity who could construct one. At the café they knew of no one who could accomplish such a task. Of course he was remembering the wretched Connecticut Window at the Église St.-Sylvestre, itself as ugly a church as he had ever seen. He imagined his window as short, not too short, and narrow. In the village they would call it the American’s Window. But there were no glassmakers, so there would be no window. Probably it was just as well. The little medieval church in Colle St.-Jacques was sublime as it stood and needed no gilding. The itinerant priest who officiated at Mass would not approve in any case. Father Émile approved of very little beyond the acknowledgment of sin and a four-course meal at the café following services. Maybe he could be bought off. Harry had more money than he knew what to do with, the legacy of his father. How would you go about bribing a priest? He supposed the same way he had gone about bribing presidents and clan chiefs and army colonels and their surrogates. You would hand him the money and say it was for the glorification of God, God’s stained-glass window, with something left over for the church fathers to distribute to the needy. Those were the things Harry thought about sitting alone in the pew at the rear of the church. When he got up to leave, his bones were chilled all the way through.

  When his father died the year before, age one hundred and five years old, Harry briefly considered returning to Connecticut but could not face the transatlantic flight, and if he moved to Connecticut, what would he do there? He knew no one. The house was too large for him. A New England winter would be a tragedy, snow to the eaves, power outages, icy roads, gloom. He would need a full-time housekeeper and a part-time gardener and a driver to help him get around, altogether too much bother. He believed the trick of old age was simplicity, a certain elegance, meaning economy of means. American medicine was no good, focused as it was on costly surgeries rather than pharmaceuticals as the French preferred. By then he knew very well that he had his mother’s genes. He was seventy-four but he looked and felt like someone much older. His mother presented the same face to the world, seventy-six when she died on the operating table after a ghastly six months of unremitting pain; that surgery was the third of three. To his last days his father had the ruddy look and physique of a polo player, beautifully turned out in gray slacks and his shabby tweed jacket, a silk ascot at his throat. He thought often of his parents, their affection for each other, their squire’s life in Connecticut. The Regency table, the kilim carpet. Marsden Hartley.

  Harry was sitting in his rocking chair on the porch impatiently waiting for the mailman. He was eager to read the newspaper’s accounts of the presidential campaign, now in full October flower. A black man running for the presidency! Harry had lived outside the country for so long he could not fathom how such a thing could happen, yet here he was, a graduate of both Columbia University and Harvard Law, a white man’s pedigree. He was a marvelous speaker and an even better writer. The last time a writer had occupied the White House was the time of the Civil War, and what a writer he was. Teddy Roosevelt wrote, too, but not very well; and nothing at all from that time to this, except for Wilson and Jimmy Carter. Some caution warranted there. Probably a writer’s temperament would not fit well in the modern White House, too much time given over to the shape and music of sentences while all around him clamored for action. A writer required repose, moments of stillness wherein an angel might speak. However, angels did not always bring benevolent thoughts, and they were not always angels. Sometimes they arrived in disguise. One look at Lincoln’s ruined face as the war drew to a close was the evidence on offer. Harry remembered FDR at the end of his life, only sixty-three years old, his face ashen, eyes dull, hands trembling. Photographs concealed much but they did not conceal everything. A Washington friend of his father’s reported the trembling hands and the wandering speech, to his father’s shocked dismay: My God, what will we do without him? Harry sat in his rocking chair on the porch of his French cottage and thought about his father’s dismay and his abrupt turn to face Harry. You’re not to breathe a word of this, son. This news stays here in this room, between us.

  Two letters arrived along with the American newspaper. He put them aside while he looked at page one, two articles on the campaign, two on Iraq. A movie star was dead. A scientist won a prize. The Dow was down owing to the financial crisis, banks broken, panic in the air, the government rushing to the rescue. Harry turned to the campaigns, reading carefully, beginning with the Democrats. He skimmed Iraq, skimmed the financial crisis, read the baseball standings, looked at a piece on men’s winter fashions, and let the newspaper slip to the floor. He had been away from America for so long he did not trust his instincts. He could no longer read between the lines. Harry looked across his field to the road and the crease-port beyond, a sailing ship entering the harbor, spinnaker full, a thrilling sight in the morning brightness. He watched it a moment, thinking that he had but the vaguest purchase on American politics. He could not recall the name of the present governor of Connecticut and he had known personally three of the previous ones. He himself did not vote and hadn’t for years. What he read in the newspapers and saw on French television resembled a half-remembered movie from his youth, everyone so young, the faces familiar but mostly nameless. This election was important but he wasn’t sure he could get up to speed for it. He was unable to assess its meaning. America was a parallax
universe, powerful, hypnotic in its way, quarrelsome and petulant, and irrelevant to him. His birth country had become a thing of curiosity; the farther away you were from it the more dangerous it seemed. A matter of optics. Up close the nation could appear harmless enough, almost buffoonish. He thought then that his various postings clung to him like a wardrobe of old suits. Each posting added another layer of distance, the picture indistinct, undeniably fabulous but foundering also. In the café his friends had stopped asking his opinion on this or that American problem. His answers were vague and off the point, his manner grudging—and then someone would ask about his war, and he was able to reply in complete sentences as if the war were only yesterday instead of decades past. But there were not very many questions about the war, another dark episode in the French version of the twentieth century. All in all, Harry preferred to watch the sailing ship, an object of vast tranquility. Tranquility was what he sought and seemed now to have found.

  Harry rose heavily from his rocking chair and stepped inside the house to fetch his binoculars. When he raised them to his eyes, taking a minute or more to achieve sharp focus, he watched the spinnaker fall, followed by the mainsail. The vessel lost way, gliding toward the buoy, and in a moment or two made fast, her crew scrambling about the deck gathering lines, furling the sails. He thought of burly monkeys in miniature swinging from one tree branch to another. At last the docking chores were completed and the crew disappeared into the cabin, leaving the helmsman alone at the wheel. Harry focused closely now. The skipper appeared to be a man of about his own age, but he was fit, trim, long-muscled, a full head of snow-white hair. The skipper lit a fat cigar and sat back in his swivel chair inspecting his surroundings, an anchorage as snug as any in the Mediterranean. Harry noticed that he was deeply tanned, the color of mahogany or the Havana in his mouth. Then from the interior of the cabin a woman’s slender hand ascended holding a bottle of beer. The skipper seized the beer, kissed the woman’s hand, and resumed his scrutiny of the harbor as his boat rocked gently on the wavelets of the incoming tide.